[Air-L] Jenny Cool e-seminar on Cyborganic ethnography, 22 June to 6 July

[John Postill]

Dear All

The EASA Media Anthropology Network will be holding its 33rd e-seminar from
this coming Tuesday 22 June to Tuesday 6 July 2010 via its mailing list.

Jenny Cool (University of Southern California) will be presenting a working
paper titled "The mutual co-construction of online and onground in Cyborganic:
making an ethnography of networked social media speak to challenges of the
posthuman" - see abstract below. Antoni Roig (Open University of Catalonia)
will be the discussant.

A PDF of this paper is now available on our site at
http://www.media-anthropology.net/index.php/e-seminars (with thanks to Philipp
Budka).

These sessions are free and open to anyone with a genuine interest in the
anthropology of media. To subscribe to the mailing list, go to
http://www.media-anthropology.net/index.php/mailing-list

John

Dr John Postill
C3 Research Institute (C3RI)
Sheffield Hallam University
Sheffield S1 2NU
United Kingdom
http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/


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Abstract

Cyborganic, the subject of this study, was a San Francisco community
whose members brought Wired magazine online, launched Hotwired; led the
open source Apache project; and staffed and started dozens of Internet
enterprises-from Craig's List to Organic Online-during the first decade
of the Web's growth as a popular platform (1993-2003).  The imaginaries,
practices, and genres of networked social media developed in this group
figured in the initial development of Web publishing and prefigured
contemporary phenomena such as Facebook and a host of other media
collectively known as "Web 2.0."  While my ethnography examines the
symbiosis of online and face-to-face sociality in the growth of Web
publishing, this paper focuses on that symbiosis at a more micro-level,
looking at specific forms and practices of networked social media in
Cyborganic that have become predominant on the contemporary U.S
Internet. Anthropologists have challenged the assumed "isomorphism
between space, place, and culture" (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 34) and
have theorized "technological infrastructures as sites for the
production of locality" without a necessarily geographic referent (Ito
1999:2). Despite this decoupling and the tendency to associate online
sociality with fragmentation and dematerialization, my Cyborganic study
demonstrates that the intermediation of online and onground can work to
consolidate and extend, rather than attenuate, affiliations based on
place and embodiment that anthropologists have long seen as defining
sources of identity and cultural difference.